The invention relates to a video recording system for recording video data, to a method for memory space distribution in the video recording system, and to a computer program.
In the present digital age, the storage of data and the administration of the stored data is a problem area which, despite rapidly dropping prices for storage media, is increasingly important as technology becomes more sophisticated.
In the field of security technology, for instance, storing streams of video data or compressed streams of video data that are recorded by surveillance cameras plays an important role. Some of the streams of video data stored should be stored for a defined length of time, such as a few days, while some data should be stored permanently, and there is accordingly a need for a highly flexible solution to the problem.
In the field of security technology, two different principles for implementing data storage are typically employed:
First, the data are stored on local data media (such as hard disks), which are directly connected to the video camera. Second, memory networks are known that record and store the data streams originating in the surveillance cameras. In both of these typical principles, old data that are no longer needed are overwritten or erased.
For the application of video reproduction, U.S. Pat. No. 5,360,007 for instance discloses a client-server system, in which video programs, such as films, from a single central mass store are broken down into fragments under the control of an administration program, and the fragments are distributed to many individual memories in the form of magnetic disks; the individual memories are allocated to different data servers. If then the same video program is called up from the memory servers by many clients, then the clients must request the individual fragments from different memory servers in order to obtain the complete video program. In this way, the access load put on the various memory servers by the clients is distributed.